Original post from this morning: In his blog work over the years, Red County’s Matt J. Cunningham tried to sell himself as an honorable and ideologically pure Orange County conservative.
The act was pathetic from the outset. Never more than a political hack, Cunningham had a priority mission: savage any real journalist who dared question his powerful pals like local GOP boss Scott Baugh.
For example, point out a Baugh wart–like I did about Baugh’s puzzlingly close relationship with Jeffrey Nielsen, the Orange County Republican activist and serial pedophile who targeted 7th and 8th grade boys for sex–and prepare for Cunningham–a political strategist by trade, to aim his bazooka crosshairs at your face. (See Nambla Fantasy, Oct. 6, 2005)
(It’s also fascinating how Cunningham’s Red County coverage of issues mirrored precisely the interests of Baugh’s private lobbying clients such as Daystar or real estate developers.)
My colleague, Gustavo Arellano, did an incredible public service leading the charge to expose dirty OC priests and who then made it a priority to smear Arellano? You got it.
When he wasn’t shamelessly spinning for the likes of Baugh or pedophile priests, Cunningham penned columns blasting liberals as hypocrites, liars and crooks who really stood for robbing taxpayers. Representative Loretta Sanchez, OC’s lone Democrat in Congress, was often his target.
Now, the national media is jumping on story. Tim Cavanaugh at the libertarian Reason.com noted in an April 7 column that Cunningham–“a Republican flack”–is enriching himself off taxpayers at the failing public commission. Is it really worth $200 an hour for Cunningham to listen to John and Ken at KFI, read newspapers and leave pro-commision comments on blogs?
The scandal underscores that if you dangle a dollar in front of certain OC Republican bigwigs they will happily abandon their political principles to follow you to hell.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.
